Caramoor: A Made-up Story about the Decontextualized Life

Lucie met me late that night. I was sitting on a shadow in front of the soda fountain. She ran out the door that night I guess, like a fighter coughing blood but swinging with too much spite in his stomach to have pain anymore, whose cells and brain and everything that develops with time stops controlling his swinging arms but that boiling spite in his stomach keeps them swinging. She was quivering, of course, the way girls do when their worlds collapse in a little bit. She sat on the shadow with me and she did not cry, and I loved her for that, because I knew she wanted to cry, but that she wanted silence even more. So we both sat there, daring God Almighty to make the first discordant sound, in the perfect, odorless darkness that was cleaning us from everything.

An hour passed, maybe less, before I mustered a "hello." She said "hello" back and we began to speak. She told me what she was doing sitting on a shadow with me late at night and I told her that I wake up in the morning and pray that no one notices that it is all smoke and mirrors imported from a distant land. She began to cry and so did I.

We slept on the grass next to the soda fountain and the following morning we waked to the sun overhead. We were laying together and she smiled when she saw that my eyes were on hers. The sun was beating down on my face, so I decided to lay for a while longer. I did not love her, at least not the way I loved other pretty girls that I met. Her breath smelled sweet like perfume, and after a while, I was no longer aware that my own breathing was gently coaxing her placid head, which laid on my upper chest, up and down, like a buoy that floated past the breaking coast. In fact, after a while, I was no longer aware of anything, but the beating Now of the sun. The hands of my watch stopped moving, so thoughtlessly I lay there, because the earth stopped rotating, and there is not much to think about during the wakeful sleep when Time takes a break from the crashing waves of the beach to watch the buoy head of girl, whom I did not love, but lived a very long while with her head on my chest.

♦ ♦ ♦

The estate was a series of boxes that materialized in layers like a magnificent work of paper-maché. The whole edifice wrapped itself around a great courtyard at the center of the estate. Flowers filled the courtyard, and chirping birds swooped down on the branches like tears.

Within the grand room of the mansion, a potpourri odor of chamomile, lavender and rose petal drifted around erotically. It was traditional of European royalty to have a great doorway in their grand rooms that did not open. The functional door was down a humble corridor, meant to deceive vagabonds and thieves, and to keep out the poor. The imported glass next to the door that did not open had ripples in it and iron bars on the outside, and through it, the outer world seemed blurred from focus. From her seat at the center of the room, Lucie Rosen fogged up the windows with pallid eyes. The eyes were translucent and empty, but, you wondered if crouching beneath the white vacuum of the eyes there was some raging compulsion banging to escape.

Lucie used to think herself quite lucky that the great door did not open, and that she was inside of it looking out at the workers in the garden, blurred by imported glass, with snow drifting down on their shoulders and steam rising from their necks, not the other way around. She was not sure she thought herself to be so lucky anymore. The potpourri scents that wafted from floor to ceiling, lingering each like purring felines, seemed to Lucie to carry the muted reminder of tragedy. Maybe it was that the herbs were uprooted and destroyed for the sake of their smell and that from the moment the aromas were released, they were quietly cascading towards their own deaths. Perhaps it was that all things beautiful are tragic, especially on dark February days, such as today, at the mansion.

It was the type of house that seemed to be owned by a man with a white coat that he takes off and drapes over a wicker chair, that he then reclines on with his feet up and a cigar in his hands, staring at windows barred with iron but detailed with the same egg-white as his evening coat. It was the type of house that seemed to be owned by a very wealthy man who was trying to fool himself and everyone else into believing that he lived at a Mediterranean villa, though he knew that he did not breath Mediterranean saltwater, but the ascensent fumes of poverty that were just about now making smoky emanations from New York City, an hour north to Caramoor, during the heart of the Great Depression in 1931. It was the type of house though, that, if the sun was perched high enough in the sky to reflect mirages off its barred, clinquant windows, a passerby might just think old Walter Rosen was not a businessman, who was a slaved to utility and to the invisible, capitalist hand of consumer misfortune, but an aristocrat well groomed at uselessness. The slouching passerby might just believe that the man with the European white evening coat had silence in his brain, which was warm like the chamomile and lavender and rose petals that filled the grand room, and that Caramoor itself, built on the soggy soil of depression, was a 15^th-century villa in Tuscany.

A murmur in the room caught Lucie Rosen's attention. Two well-dressed caterers brought out on their shoulders a pink-frosted cake. The two caterers were beaming at Lucie and she knew that they wanted her to get up from her chair and walk to the table, which, by now, was lined with smiling guests who looked quite foolish to her as they grinned and clapped and started that song people sing on this occasion. The guests motion for Lucie to get up from her chair. Lucie, though, was content to remain at her seat. The room itself, and thousands of cakes all over the world, exhorted her to get up and walk to the table, but she just looked with those pallid eyes at the window next to the door that would not open.

Those translucent eyes seemed locked on the window, as guests began to laugh and get up from their seats to get Lucie to celebrate with them. A great force pushed her through life, she fancied. In her head she saw her life one stumbled, inebriated step after another, over the differences without distinction, victories and defeats that did not mean a damn thing, that were scattered about the hall of her days, like mirrors reflecting against each other, coming together in a grand illusion of any choice at all, but the greatness still forcing her to walk in the direction of the cake which she did not even bake, and did nothing at all to deserve, except exist for another year.

It was Lucie’s birthday and it was for this reason that the guests were at Caramoor this particular February day. Exactly seventeen years ago, Lucie's mother was sweating on Pope Urban XIII's bed frame, which was imported from Rome. She was groaning on sheets once owned by the Medici family of Florence. This family was known to kill its enemies with rose petals, laced with poison. The chemicals blinded and deafened the enemies, and made them completely without capacity to do anything but whimper as their hearts slowed and their lungs filled with the noxious scents of Valentines Day – which, as it so happened, was Lucie Rosen's birthday, seventeen years ago, exactly today. Lucie got up from the chair and flashed a false grin. The partygoers began to whoop and shout, and cut into the cake.

Maybe it was the audacity of the dreary weather, or just that birthdays have a way of making the cheerful melancholy, but when Lucie walked to the table she hung her head. She thought back to the day she realized what death meant. She cried when she was eight years old at eleven o'clock, stumbling downstairs, because she began for the first time understand that impossible abyss of the future, or, so to speak, that impossible ecstasy of nothingness that was creeping forth irrevocably. She wept with her mother, hoping deep down that from her mother's arms would sprout a sturdy tree, nourished from the salty tears of sadness, that would hoist her from the unknowing. They call the tree that Lucie hoped to grasp onto the Tree of Knowledge. They tell us to hate Eve for touching it. If Eve's sin was knowing, then Lucie's was lifelessness and she learned to hope for that tree.

You see, there is no Eden outside of Caramoor. There is no direction to travel in the search for salvation, in the grand room of the mansion. It is as though the compass dial was finally placed on top of the point it had always reached towards. Without the gyrating struggle, what becomes of the compass? The answer, we can suspect, is the same as to the question about Lucie Rosen, the girl born in the architectural metaphor for heaven. Perhaps, to the privileged few, utopia is not on a map -- it is getting up in the morning without the pangs of emptiness.

So Lucie sat at the table and ate the food with the guests, and remained quiet. It was very lonely, though, the walk from her chair to the table, towards a cake that she did not deserve, to celebrate the passage of time.

“The marvelous thing," Lucie's father boasted, "is that there is not a plank of wood in this house that was not painted and carved by another person, a master from another place, and imported by me personally"

"Father, they know the house -- they read the papers"

"Tremendous, just fabulous, Walter. You've really outdone yourself," said a guest, with a cigar in his mouth.

“Oh Walter, if only we could all be so lucky" said another.

“To take from others?”

“Of course. To not have to be ourselves. To think the thoughts of others."

“Our music room is imported from Toledo. We have a 19^th-century green-jade screen from China. You've heard of Donatello and Della Robbia, I am quite sure."

“I think I'd like to be a poet, or a king from Europe. Yes, I simply adore art."

“In our bedroom, we sleep on the frame once owned by Pope Urban VIII" said Walter Rosen, as he sipped his cocktail and cooed in the ears of his guests. He had spent his life searching out all the artistic styles and architectural predilections of every civilized age, and gathered them together in Caramoor, the name he gave to the house that had successfully claimed every idea from every age except its own.

"Oh, and what is that?" said a rich woman with sexual lips, who attended parties like this one at Caramoor, this particularly dreary February day. She pointed above one of the gated doors. Her legs were smooth and severe like rivers stones.

"That is a model of the ship used by Francisco Pizarro when he traveled to the New World. Pizarro conquered Peru, you know. Do you see that sword above the ship?

"Yes"

“That sword is the very one used by Pizarro's brother to defeat the Incans. One-hundred-and-sixty-seven soldiers ragtag soldiers defeated eighty thousand Incan worriers. 1542 was the year, if I remember correctly. It was the clash of civilizations. The Incans were using heathen weapons, piteous, that's the word. The emperor, the fellow Allahalop, you say, thought Pizarro was a god, a demon, I don't know. Pizarro destroyed that army that day; his nation destroyed all their armies other days. Isn't that something. Splendid, but terrible – like everything these days. The roses are beautiful, but they die for their scents," he said, motioning to the herb sachet in the corner, with chamomile, lavender and rose petal.

"Walter, that is tragedy." she said from her throat, the tone as affected as the sentiment and she touched his knee.

"I weep and laugh, darling. The Incans were believed to be the fiercest fighters, of all the Indians. Not one of Pizarro's men died."

Five of the sixty-or-so guests that circled the Grand Room sat on a plush couch with Walter Rosen, far away from Lucie, his daughter, who was sitting on a chair at the center of the room. He seemed to need pleasure more and more as he aged. He whetted his voracious appetite with artwork and women, hungry always for more, because the need became greater, not lesser, the more beautiful things he brought to Caramoor . He looked over to Lucie, grinning, like he was watching a horror picture, and he knew the happy ending and that the whole thing was scripted anyways. Sex and death always seemed to go together. The massacre of the Incans seemed to get her, he mused. Sex is for creating life, surely, but it is also for destroying life. The good destruction, though, with pleasure. You are with the person and it does not matter anymore who she is. She is just now and again and again but never what came before, only what is coming now, now and more, at that moment now always, never back where the person has lived life and formulated thoughts and expectations and sowed seeds. The past dies and pleasure lives. Sex and death tasted like the alcoholic mix in his cocktail, which, at eleven o'clock, was coursing thickly through his body, making him a bit dizzy. He might as well have sex before death, he thought, as he touched the rich woman's shoulder, and called for more liquor. It does not work the other way around.

She was like one of the paintings he bought in Italy, this empty, this rich bitch. He knew too much about his wife to love her the way he loved the art he collected. You would cry for the Incans if you knew too much about them. Yes, he thought, if you knew the Incans, then Pizarro's beauty would be muddled. Splendid and terrible were the same; they were both beautiful because you can put them in a case with velvet and glass. Yes, there were always new women hungry for money, death and beauty that he could import, like the relief by Donatello behind him.

Walter whispered something in the woman's ear, and got he up from his seat. She remained on the couch, and turned her crimsoned cheek and curled her finger muscles.

The guests told Walter that they felt as if they had traveled to another country when they visited his home. Perhaps what they really felt, is that they had traveled with Pizarro himself to Cajamarca, and that they had witnessed a massacre. Only in Caramoor, it was not the Incans who were slaughtered; it was time and distance and culture and everything that could die did die. So nothing that survived in the halls of the mansion could ever die anymore, for pretty things like paintings and old swords and reliefs could live for a very long time, without context or soul. One man's suffering and another's genius were owned by Walter Rosen and hung up among the ruins in the rooms and corridors, like a fantastic museum of cauterized splendor.

That night, Lucie she could not sleep. She could rarely sleep at night. Instead, she would toss and turn, frustrated that she could not sleep. The door out of Caramoor or the book with knowledge or the road, the branches on that Tree of Knowing that we hate Eve for grabbing, seemed to whisper with their design and existence a sultry promise in her ears that there is something better, out of the grand room soaked with chamomile, lavender and rose petals. And that if she could get there, she would not have to look anymore into the mirrors that have faded with time, or the reliefs or paintings or anything else for a sense of who she was. And it is nice, late at night, to believe that this is true.

♦ ♦ ♦

So Lucie and I traveled around in her father's black Cadillac without anywhere in particular to go. From the road a rainbow effluvium rose into the air, from the dead, towards the sky and heaven. The road made sultry promises in our ear, so we drove around for days, but only at night, because it is so dark on the road late at night, and the winding of the pavement and the tall trees that obscure the vista, that we could not see anything but the divider lines that seem to flick on forever. I learned that if I stared at the divider lines, their forever flickering rocked me to sleep like a lullaby. I liked to watch the line because I realized that if I am hypnotized it does not matter that I was afraid that we were never going to stop searching in the black Cadillac on the road late at night for that somewhere to finally sleep. I wished to be off the road, in the standstill of time. But instead the headlights beat against the darkness, pointing forward. They pointed in the direction of expectation, and that hope for the Tree that Lucie and I wanted so much, that we assumed was waiting just a little farther down the line, I am told, is the American dream.

Six days after we cried on the shadow, Lucie returned to Caramoor. Her mother and father kissed and hugged her, and her maids prepared the bath. I came to Caramoor with her, but Walter could not see me because his senses had atrophied and fattened. The adipose tissue softened his soul like it softened his thighs. Lucie took the bath, and ate her supper, and said goodbye to me. She kissed me on the cheek and whispered in earnest that she was an Emperor of a Paper-Maché kingdom built a long time ago by some dead guy and that her palace was crumbling. I nodded, knowing that she was wrong, for it was not crumbling, but that it never was anything more than glue and paper and lies in the first place. So I left the mansion and disappeared on the elegiac road and she woke up from the dream.

Crisis At Home and Abroad

The American people face the dilemma of the man whose willful apathy allowed him to be robbed of his wealth and status by those closest to him. The dispirited man could choose, as he likely might, to ignore the theft of his identity. He could elect to deny the character inefficiencies that allowed his cherished possessions to be purloined so effortlessly, from beneath his trusting nose. Otherwise, he could admit that something valuable was lost and that he must, once again, try to regain it.

We the American people must make this choice – to concede that the checks and balances of our little-r republican government are eroding, that bits of our democracy and freedom were taken from us with nary a muted objection, and that we must now fight to regain them. Or, we can blithely ignore the situation, until we arrive finally at the constitutional impasse towards which we have been heading, and the principles that define our nation become completely up for grab by those in power.

Nearly everyone – the American electorate, its representative organ in Washington, our military and diplomatic experts, world opinion and the Iraq government itself – resoundingly opposes our presence in Iraq. If one man can lead a nation to war, despite its citizens and legislature, in order to gratify his own ideological predilections and consolidate his own executive power, then do we have a democracy in any meaningful sense of the word? The rift between public opinion and public policy has expanded tremendously in recent years. However, as the ruckus over Bush’s prime-time “surge” reveals, we have not admitted to this democracy deficit, which accompanies, of course, our budget and trade deficits. Instead, we have buried our heads, like the robbed man in denial, within the minutia of logistics. While we debate troop levels, the political fundamentals of our nation crumble. The question is not, How did we lose the war? It is, Why have we waged the war, and at what costs in American treasure, blood and constitutional integrity?

The American struggle in Iraq is less about oil or democracy or terrorism than it is about power. That Bush wanted to invade Iraq before September 11^th is a fact beyond dispute. Iraq is but the amphitheater of chaos and blood, not the play itself. The war is about the power of the president as he consolidates his unitary control over the American state. The war is the struggle between republic and empire.

History has proven that the two – republic and empire – cannot not be simultaneously sustained. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and destroyed Rome’s republic in order to preserve the empire. Great Britain withdrew forces from around the world in order to renounce its empire and salvage the democracy. Like its predecessors, the United States must make the choice in the tug-of-war between the primacy of its democratic heritage and that of its imperial ambitions.

Empire is defined as a militarized state with a global, hegemonic agenda. The Golden Age of the American Empire thus began, appropriately, with war. World War II taught America the value of a sustained military establishment – importantly, not just as a tool for expansion abroad, but as a means for creating an efficient and obedient society at home. Indeed, the American military establishment did as much to save Europe from the hell of fascism as it did to lift the United States from the hell of poverty. If the New Deal “primed the pump” by providing civil service jobs, then the military economy did the same, with the added bonus of loyalty and national obedience – jobs were supplied to the unemployed from bullet metallurgy to detailing the planes that the government hoped, one day, the workers would die in fighting for their nation. Exiled Polish economist Michal Kalecki described the process of predicating the national economy on the national military establishment as “military Keynesianism,” a tactic which, simultaneously, revitalized both the American and German economies, inaugurating the empire of the former, and collapsing the empire of the later.

The short-term economic gains of a militarized economy are obvious, but the price, paid with our national character of boisterous democracy and grassroots dissent, is insidious. Since its inauguration at the onset of WWII, the behemoth weapons industry – the industry of commercialized violence – has been entrenching itself into the American economy like an octopus, fed by nearly a trillion dollars a year, more than one and a half times all the other countries in the world combined, and smothering our republican virtue. The cephalopodan tentacles reach not just to the thousands of good American families who depend on the manufacturing of weapons for their daily sustenance, but, increasingly, to the capitalists and corporate profiteers, whose businesses depend on the exportation of mechanized carnage. Dwight Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” in the American state, during his 1961 presidential farewell address:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

Eisenhower knew that militarism and democracy do not pair well. The arms race has the momentum of provocative rhetoric and the inertia of national loyalty, so it stifles debate. The race depends on a constant state of emergency, and thus plays out most effectively in a simplified world of allies and enemies, terrorists (or fascists or communist) and freedom-lovers. The establishment sustains itself when national prosperity is intertwined with the specter of war, and no one wants to stop priming the pump.

Arming for prospective war tends helps the economy, but it also tends to lead to real war. America has found out that bombs have a peculiar tendency of being dropped. And it is during times of war, when our nation is most vulnerable to evildoers abroad, that the president can arrogate the rights and power of a free state – unregulated speech, open elections, due process of the law – for himself in the name of national security. Thus there exists a feedback loop between the powers of the executive and the size of the nation’s military: the greater the American war machine, then the stronger the executive and the quieter the masses. James Madison warns us:

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. In war…the discretionary power of the executive is extended…and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people…

In this way, in every way, constitutional crisis at home is inextricably related to military crisis abroad. Take, for example, Richard Nixon whose unlawful expansion of executive might came at a time when the United States was floundering in a likewise debacle of imperial nation-building, Vietnam. His power abuses at home were utterly linked to his power abuses abroad. And so reveals the rift between democracy and empire. Nixon wiretapped Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the pentagon papers; he broke into Watergate to monitor war critics; and he compiled an “enemies list” cataloguing American treason, as troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and bombs were piercing Cambodian skies. Indeed, the overall atmosphere of mistrust and presidential paranoia was borne out of fledgling foreign intervention. The expansion of empire demanded the reduction of democracy.

Nixon's dual crisis abroad and at home is eerily similar to our situation today. In the fall of 2002 the administration announced its National Security Strategy of global dominance: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” The Bush Doctrine equates to the declaration of unquestioned supremacy. Implied is that no country can ever confront the unipolar power of the United States and, if it does, we retain the right to invade at any moment. Our intentions are so brazen and disrespectful to the premise of a global order that, surely, imperialism will be one of the profound legacies of the Iraq war.

To enforce the Grand Strategy of preventative imperialism, Bush has used executive power as a birthright. Bush's expansion of our military might thus is intimately connected to his expansion of his executive might. He has pitted our empire against our democracy.The enraging narrative of his affront to American democracy -- aggrandizing the powers of the president in war time at the expense of the powers a free state in peace time -- is both over-repeated and undertold. To the minority that cares about the dire state of our union, it has been heard too many times. But the audible silence of our national media and citizenry suggest that the story, both repetitious and unheard, bares repeating: Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction, but there were not weapons; he said that Al Qeada was implicated in 9/11, but it was not; he officially sanctioned torture at prison cells like Abu Ghraib and Uzbekistan; he has detained “enemy combatants” without habeas corpus; he used the National Security Agency to “data mine” American speech, violating an explicit congressional law banning such an action and fourth amendment restrictions of search and seizure; and he has penned secret memos about the use of torture and indefinite imprisonment of soldiers that, if accepted, would fundamental alter the structure of American government. "We're at war," the president maintains. "We must protect America's secrets." The premise of sustained war has allowed the president, in the name of national security, to appropriate the tools of tyranny.

Republic is not feasible with an empire abroad and a congress, corrupted and complacent, that has forfeited its right to regulate the president, whose unilateral aggression, domestic spying, arbitrary violation of federal law and unregulated torture are hallmarks of dictatorship. However, empire itself is no longer feasible – and self evidently not moral. In a post-imperial world, with heightened sensitivity to local autonomy, the United States cannot hope to absorb other nations into its dominion. Also, in a post-nuclear age, it cannot hope to defeat its rival nation-states on the battlefield. We cannot be Rome, in a world so very different. And by reenacting, or, one might say, re-reenactment, the follies of this delusion of imperial grandeur, we pay too high a price with the fabric of our national republic. We should wake from the soporific of empire and resolve to fight to gain back what we have lost, like the robbed man who has dried his tears, stood up from the curve and stares into the sun.

Cameron's Culture

A youth sits in the passenger seat of a car, as it motors down a country road, going nowhere in particular. It’s one in the morning on a Saturday, and rain is pattering on the windshield. Its rhythm is bleeding into the car, competing against the sound system in a cacophonous symphony. As the driver drives, the youth looks out the window. Tonight, unlike other nights obscured by darkness and rain, the youth can actually see the country road passing by him – the stone walls and crooked mailboxes, the potholes like shallow ponds teaming with life and the moon’s gentle smirk. While gazing sleepy-eyed and empty, he begins to notice, quite subtly at first, that the dirt road is rapidly disappearing behind the car. He begins to half-appreciate that the unremarkable road and its hollow whimpers are receding with each turn of the tires, never to be there the same way again.

They turn right into a lot and park the car with unintended ferocity, jerking the two forward in their seats. For tonight, at least, like last night, these youths of excess and vacuity, of suffocation and alienation, fraught with contradiction and naïveté, can drive around aimlessly. For tonight, at least, like last night, with nowhere to go and nothing in store, they can search for quick thrills and small miracles at the picnic tables and checkout lines of Cameron’s Deli, the hang-out for dislocated youths like themselves.

They open the door and step out into the miasma of rain and cigarette smoke and semidarkness that lingers at the Cameron’s Deli parking lot late at night.

“Hey,” says a high school student with designer clothes and wild eyes and a cellphone at his ear.

“Hey, what’s up,” says the youth, extending his hand and grinning truthfully. With this ceremonial extension he is offering both assertion and admission; he’s affirming and conceding that, for tonight, like last night, he is his brother and that their promises of fraternity and togetherness are only as deep as the skin on their palms that they shakes with. His greetings are hybrids, like everything under the smirking moon. He is a hybrid. He is a male of suburban paradise, of picket-fences and golden retrievers, who is animated – paralyzed – by sordidness and deception. Paradoxically, like all adolescents, he is stuck at the cross-roads of juvenile sensibilities and mature responsibilities. He is not a kid, but he is not a grown-up either. And in this no-man’s-land between the innocence of childhood and the dreariness of adulthood, right off Route 35, is Cameron’s Deli, open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

◙ ◙ ◙

He walks to the lighted windows of the deli, shining like a neon oasis in the middle of the suburban Sahara. To him and his compatriots, the Deli is a teaming forest of glitz and lights and softcore pornography in the middle of miles of nothingness. Absurd and disillusioned Arabian bandits meet to plot their next escapades. Fools and swindlers and wise men can try their hands. The youth opens the door and walks in. And Arabian thieves bustle about. They buy their specialty-sandwich rations, sharpen their scimitars and adjust their turbans. They make their emergency cellphone calls and network their necessary connections. They are brave crusaders awaiting a fight.

The youth grabs a can of Red Bull, waits on line, pays the cashier, and swaggers between the bandits with smokey-jackets and stubble beards, and opens the door. He leaves the Deli to walk into the surrounding camp of soldiers. They are perched on picnic tables and cars and fences. They are having clandestine conversations of pot-hookups and parties and beer and girls. He overheard two in front of him.

“So what are you doin’ tonight?” asked a backwards cap.

“I don’t know. I heard X is having people over,” responds the other backwards cap.

“Obscenity that. I hate that kid.”

“Yeah. Muck that” said the former, extending his hand and spitting on the grass ground in front of him. He stands up, adjusts his sagging pants, and moves on. The latter does the same.

For a moment, the youth watches the two, and cannot help but think of a ballet, only a late-night ballet; a ballet not quite of dancing, but of frantic feet shuffling. Yes, a ballet with twirls, the youth thinks, but more like spinning than twirling, spinning around and around, with a ferocious, dizzying laxity. How odd, he thinks, that we are always fetishizing on expectation, always moving, yet, night after night, we always seem to spin back to the wet picnic tables of the 24/7 Deli. Maybe it is more like a carnival ride than a ballet. Yes, he smiles to himself, one that spins you around and around until you get off and throw up into the helpless dirt. He pops the can of his Red Bull and takes a sip.

◙ ◙ ◙

Amidst the bustle, a cop car pulls up. The policeman gets out, not with a stomp but with a click and a swoop, not with a bang but with a sigh. The whole night sighs. In a moment, there is a frantic movement of bodies and vodka-filled water bottles and car keys and swearwords. In moment, the Tunisian horsemen become drunken teenagers; the rebels become school children with SATs scores; and the crusaders who have fought valiantly against the hypocrisy of their surrounds become nothing but the scabs and skin lesions of the suburban mange they fight against.

The cop puts a chain between two posts that abut the entrance of the area where the Cameron’s Deli picnic tables sit, but the ragtag militia stays to hold the fort. Without their canteen, the drug dealers might have to find another pit stop for cheap dreams and broken promises.

“Let’s get out of here,” the youth says to his friend.

“Don’t be a coward,” his driver says. “This is all we mucking have and this obscenity cop obscenity wants to take it away.”

◙ ◙ ◙

With no other option, the youth turns to walk home, thankful that the rain had stopped. Walking in the dark, at first, of course, he is afraid – of tripping over the pebbles beneath his feet, of agitating wild animals, of the stirring of the wind. However, as the Deli retreats from visibility step by step, the youth slowly becomes more familiar with the contours of the road he had raced vulgarly over many times in the past, and indeed just five minutes before. The parking lot becomes but a neon pinhole of the past and the natural moonlight takes its place. The youth knows eventually he will arrive home. Until then, in the darkness from dusk to dawn, with not a Cluckin’ Russian novelty sandwich in sight, he begins to listens only to the beating of his heart, the pattering of his footsteps and the quiet dance of the world around him.

As he walks away, retracing steps he had taken so carelessly in the past, he does not even have to turn around to know that Cameron’s Deli is gone for good.

Zero Tolerance and Prison Ethics

New York state generally believes that no rehabilitation measures can cure the latent danger of murders, rapists or other menaces who diminish the wellbeing of society. If the warden, twirling his nightstick, sees drugs in the prison yard or knives in the cafeteria or hears threats shouted through the cell doors, he punishes the prisoners quickly and without remorse, without discretion and without leeway. After all, inmates detained in high security prisons are dangerous folk, and nothing can fix that.

This Draconian discipline philosophy makes a great deal of sense in a system designed to punish and ostracize lowlife prisoners. But in a suburban school in place to equip teenage boys and girls (who aren't dangerous folk) with the skills needed to succeed in the real world beyond Cameron's Deli, the prison ethic that knives are for killing and drugs are for destroying is wayward, dangerous and the cause of a great deal of human unhappiness.

In the age of zero tolerance, the buzz-word for school administrators, discipline hearings conduct themselves as trials in carnival courtrooms of the absurd. A picture with a beer bottle means forced abdication from peer group, National Honors Society, suspension from sports teams, poetry clubs and Campus Congress. No questions asked. A pocket knife equates to five day suspension regardless of intent or motivation or circumstance. Signing a yellow pass without a monitor so one can go home on the late bus – a requirement bafflingly illogical – means forgery and theft and destruction of school property and a five day suspension reported on the college application.

Teenagers do foolish things and make nonsensical decisions; That's the hallmark of being an adolescent. We're certainly not children, but we're not yet adults. Sure, mistakes are made, but even by the most decent and forthright students. Gratuitous violence is a rarity, so why assume that a pocket knife is a weapon? Fraternizing and co-mingling with others that drink beer is a requisite, so why treat such actions and wicked and evil and punishable in an extreme degree? Because there's a slip-up doesn't mean we're armed and dangerous, prepared to destroy the world's gentle. It means we're teenagers. It's gleefully understood by administrators of school justice that no-mitigation five day suspensions are permanent fixtures on a student's college application. If we're decent and well-meaning students and not despicable fugitives, why do our punishments damage our futures rather than guide them? Why do they destroy rather than improve?

It's a truism that any philosophy taken to the extreme is bad. But the impulses behind zero tolerance (the name itself belying its sanity) are a reflection of the broader impulses behind Americanism. There is no statistical evidence whatsoever that zero tolerance works to decrease school violence or drug use; Instead, it's a political and symbolic policy that reflects in a nation whose flag colors don't run our collective fetish for “personal responsibility.” We pull ourselves up from our bootstraps, we wage war on poverty, drugs and terror and we need to take ownership of our actions. We prosecute the “bad apples” at Abu Ghraib, but don't investigate the insidious undercurrents that the apples grew from. To admit that perhaps teenagers drink because they're stifled and bored or cheat on tests because they're beaten by the high expectations of John Jay hyper-competitiveness, to suggest that certain banalities are symptomatic of broader pathologies of adolescence would be permissive, and permissiveness is the sign of an ideology which is in serious disfavor. The advocates of zero tolerance scoff at nuance as yellow-bellied and discretion as weakness.

Zero tolerance leaves a profound impress on the minds of the decent future leaders of our world that they are not teenagers who might make a few mistakes, but are inmates in a dreary bureaucracy where procedure takes precedence over common sense, where authority is the enemy, justice is irrelevant and the distinction between a school system and prison system is merely rhetorical decoration.

July’s People and Intellectual Freedom

In South Africa, dancing naked in the rain, exposed to the explosive freedom of natural existence, liberated from the cold tethers of suburban sterility, Maureen Smales begins to reflect on intellectual superficiality. In a small hut, during the interregnum between the destruction of the apartheid government and the birth of a new order of thought, Maureen learns to reject narrow-minded assumptions and to question archaic senses of sin. She learns to embrace human diversity. July’s People, by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, teaches us to look critically at our belief systems and our world. White, liberal, and affluent, we’re all a little like Maureen Smales. We’re all a little trapped in this quaint suburbia, sheltered from human suffering.

However, it’s exposure to literature—to other worlds and other people and other ideas—that frees us from the repressive homogeneity of everyday existence. A diverse literature base functions as one of the most potent safeguards against stereotype and narrow-mindedness; and ignorance functions as the strongest bulwark of prejudice.

Indeed, one of the most important goals of education—of John Jay High School—is to teach students to analytically approach a diverse array of facts and opinions, to weigh pieces of evidence, and to make educated conclusions. Any person who wishes to stifle this diversity of thought—in the name of personal values or community standards—is promoting a certain breed of bigotry and simplemindedness, and I refuse to be silent.

As many know, a single-man campaign is being waged against the school to censor the book July’s People from the tenth grade required-reading curriculum. The book, according to a February 2nd letter to the editors of The Lewisboro Ledger by the man at the forefront of the campaign, “contains graphic descriptions of female genitalia and sexual intercourse,” as well as, “profanity of the type that is not acceptable in any other organization.” He cited the book’s study guide as evidence. He misspelled the author’s name.

By definition, parental concern crosses the nebulous line towards “censorship” when it seeks to restrict not just one child from reading a book, but an entire grade. This precisely what the man is aiming to achieve. Questioning a book is fine, but seeking to ban it is censorship—plain and simple.

Censorship, like a poisonous gas released in open air, threatens to stifle and destroy based on the direction of the wind. We should not restrict the intellectual freedom of John Jay High School students based on the social winds of contemporary times. We should not limit the freedom of information in this school based on the moral decisions of a few. What is at stake, my fellow students and teachers, is nothing less than human prosperity: the magnificent diversity of opinions, ideas, and thought so essential to the betterment of mankind cannot flourish in the cold conformity sought by a repressive few.

Liberal freedom of thought is paradoxical. Indeed, at first glance, we find that the philosophy behind censoring July’s People might make sense. Consider this: a free society functions by allowing individuals to make choices concerning what media they’re exposed to. Essentially, freedom of choice supersedes any conception of right and wrong: I may not support homosexuality, but I support one’s right to make a personal decision; I may not support euthanasia, or Howard Stern, or even Playboy, but I support one’s right to choose. Without the ability to make choices, we can no longer consider ourselves free, right? So, in a way, I ask myself, Why should a community’s value system be imposed on this man’s son? If this were a racist administration pushing a racist book, don’t we have the right to exempt ourselves from reading it? Who are we to judge the validity of one concern over another concern?

Though attractive, these arguments are fundamentally misguided: in the schoolyard freedom has a different face. Educators in our school system are endowed with the unique responsibility of determining what is valuable and what is trash; what is good and what is bad. Sure, in the public world everyone gets to choose his or her own path in life, and everyone gets to change the channel, put down the book, or turn off the radio. However, it’s in the educational world that we equip ourselves with the intellectual resources to makes these choices. So, it’s in the educational world—by its inherent didactic nature—that we must trust those above us to make educated and prudent decision concerning the media we’re exposed to. The school system is a training ground for the development of opinions and insights, not a microcosm of modern society where everyone has the ultimate freedom of choice.

In fact, in the 1973 Supreme Court case of Miller v. California, it was found that no material containing, “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,” can be banned from the public sector or the school systems. Likewise, John Jay’s humanities department selection criteria states clearly that, “the fact of sexual incidents or profanity appearing in a book or passage will not, of itself, disqualify a book from selection.” Simply put, any censorship under the guise of enforcing “community standards” demands a higher burden of moral consideration than simply do I agree with the material being taught? Instead, educational value must play an integral role in the decision of literature inclusion.

In The Ledger, the man writes, “[I] placed my trust in the administration of our school to protect my child.” It’s true that our High School must consider freedom of speech based on the social utility that it provides.

It must be made explicitly clear, however, that July’s People—considering its author’s Nobel Prize, its towering themes of social justice, and its beautiful glimpses into the human spirit—is a literary masterpiece, and provides an important social utility to the school and to the community. July’s People, reviewed by the New York Times as, “so flawlessly written that every one of its events seems chillingly, ominously possible,” is not pornography and is not filth, it’s a work of art.

Though sexual undertones make important commentaries within the book, in no way is sex a central aspect of the text. “I hope that as our teachers access worthy texts with their students,” writes Mr. Cass, director of John Jay’s humanity department, “they will help to distinguish the gratuitous from that which enlarges a view of relationships, the prurient from the honestly human, the sleazy from the artistic. In a small way, July’s People allows us to do that.”

As a community must stand by the unequivocal declaration that there is nothing bad about sex, and that debasing sexual knowledge as wicked and sinful is a morbid and intellectually repressive practice. We must acknowledge that official ignorance of sexual matters, when coupled with the inevitable knowledge disseminated in locker rooms and weekend parties teaches children to be deceitful and hypocritical to their elders. We must assert that virtue based on deception is not virtue at all, and that knowledge based on delicate filtration is not knowledge at all.

It’s true that democracy of action is the surest form of government; however, democracy of thought is dangerous, for the suppression of legitimate intellectualism demands more than a mere preponderance of opinion. Tyranny of the majority must not threaten the diversity of our school system.

It’s the liberal view of knowledge dissemination that all things, in varying degrees, are questionable; and it’s the strictly illiberal conviction that certain facts must not ever be subject to the critical hands of human reason. With that it mind, we must have faith that dissent will only elucidate the truth. That discussion rather than legislative force must determine the content of our school’s curriculum, and that open lines of communication concerning what is appropriate and what isn’t are fundamentally important to the health of our school district and indeed our democracy at large. And as students we must not be short-changed, infantilized, and isolated from this important dialogue concerning our academic freedom. We must not let the poison gas of censorship and moral agenda be released to obscure our vision and sedate our quest for knowledge. We must not censor July’s People from our school’s reading curriculum.

The Case for the Withdrawal from Iraq

There can no longer be any doubt: the Iraq war, immoral and unjustified, is the greatest threat to United States’ national security and the most potent danger to our principles of freedom and cultural respect. A war waged on pretexts of fraud and deception, our presence in Iraq has strengthened and emboldened terrorist organizations worldwide, resulted in the death of more than two thousand American soldiers and ten and a half times as many innocent Iraqi civilians, rotted our domestic and military institutions, and devastated a country to the brink of civil war. Do not be fooled by the hollow and self-congratulatory rhetoric of our president, this is not a war of Jeffersonian idealism, but of insidious and undeterred imperialism. Before anymore American blood, wealth, or political effort is poured into this futile and illegal war, U.S. forces must make a speedy withdrawal a top priority.

A discussion concerning our withdrawal should begin with a discussion concerning our invasion. In 2002, Colin Powell voiced to the World Economic Forum the official justification for a United States’ invasion of Iraq, claiming that we have the “sovereign right to use force to defend ourselves” against “evil regimes” possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and assisting terrorist. The collapse of this justification—when the harsh reality that Saddam Hussein neither had WMDs nor ties to al Queada emerged—is well documented and well known. However, the Bush administration quietly dropped this standard of imminent threat, asserting that the mere “intent and ability” of a country to create WMDs, not the possession of them, justified and warranted American violence. All countries have the ability to create biological weapons and the intent to do so is strictly subjective; therefore, there is practically no country that Mr. Bush, with his doctrine of preventive war, could not justify invading and demolishing. This National Security Strategy—the right to invade any country we please—cannot logically be extended to all countries unless chaos reins, and therefore undermines the most fundamental moral truism of universality. The United States has claimed its unilateral and exclusive right to invade any country at any moment. It’s hard to envision that American imperialism will not be one of the lasting legacies of the Iraq invasion.

Self-righteous patriotism is becoming increasingly transparent as our real reasons for war become increasingly evident—the rationale transcends far beyond a concern for wellbeing of the Iraqi people or for the danger of the Hussein regime. The truth: the Bush administration intended to invade Iraq well before 9-11, well before the phrase “war on terror” was even coined. The reason is simple: to establish military bases and a pro-U.S. government at the heart of the world’s oil supply. To achieve this goal, the success of the war depends not of freeing the democratic voice of the Iraqi people, but suppressing it. Our presence is stained by putrid intentions.

After previous pretexts had been debunked, Bush contrived a new rationale for our occupation (adopted November 2003). The war is justified not because Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States, Bush claimed, but is justified as an effort to bring freedom, stability and democracy to the Middle East. Conservative warmongers and idealistic liberals alike (myself included) ate the rhetoric up. Sanity, however, demands skepticism over a rationale for war used only when previous justifications have collapsed.

George Bush promised the United States, the Iraqi people, and the international community that a victory in Iraq would bring peace and democracy to a country that knows only dictatorship and jihadism, and safety worldwide. We know now that none of this is true, of course. Democracy in Iraq is nothing more than a bureaucratic morass, peace is nonexistent as long as U.S. forces occupy the country, and, as Americans, we are far less safe now than before our soldiers risked their lives and our wellbeing in this war.

To some, the reason we should stay in Iraq is an idealistic (and naive) submission to concepts of Jeffersonian democracy—that democracy and freedom are the United States’ to spread. However, the sordid deviations of the president’s rhetoric from his actions make it hard not to dismiss his talk of freedom and democracy as nothing more than self-serving and self-congratulatory babble. For Bush, talk of democracy perpetuation is the means for a much more sinister agenda, not the ends. How can America preach democracy to a region where we send shackled and hooded prisoners to be tortured? How can America preach freedom to a region we’ve been cozying up to dictators within for the past 60 years? The United States has handicapped its democracy-building efforts by coming into the war in Iraq with a history of selfish support of dictatorship, arrogant disregarding for international mentality, and cruel sponsorship of torture.

To others, the argument for a continued occupation in Iraq is that if we leave now, things will become much worse. Bush claims, “In Iraq, there is no peace without victory.” However, all evidence indicates that he has the argument backwards: it’s the hulking presence of American forces within Iraq that is feeding, rather than averting, the ravenous fires of chaos in Iraq. The quote should read: in Iraq, there is no peace until we leave. Before we suggest that chaos will ensue if we withdrawal from Iraq, we must acknowledge that there already is chaos. We must acknowledge, as former top military official Gen. Richard B. Myers affirms, that the insurgency is no less powerful now than a year ago and that rebels such as these have been known to survive undeterred for 7 to 12 years. We must acknowledge that unemployment is up 60 percent, malnutrition has increased nearly 75 percent, food and water are rare commodities, oil reservoirs are well below prewar levels, Baghdad, lacking electricity, is dark and gloomy all day long, and military incidents have increased from 150-a-week to nearly 700-a-week.

Most fundamentally, we know that if we stay the course, continued mayhem is guaranteed; however, if we withdrawal, though Iraq’s future would be uncertain, a chance for peace would be relinquished. There is much reason to have hope in that uncertain future. The Sunnis, who provided the base for Saddam’s support and currently head the insurgency, would be more likely to participate in an Iraqi government after the withdrawal of American troops, and they would be more likely to counterbalance the theocratic and paramilitary Shiite rulers now controlling Iraq’s fledgling democracy.

There is no way, under these circumstances, that a continued presence in Iraq could ever help the Iraqi people. The longer American forces remain in Iraq, the more we compound the cost of the original mistake. Our occupation has pulverized the country, galvanized terrorist to an ear shattering degree, and reduced, not fostered, chances for a better future in Iraq or America. Middle East expert Fawaz Gerges remarks, it is “simply unbelievable how the war has revived the appeal of a global jihadi Islam that was in a real decline after 9-11.” It’s widely acknowledged that the way to fight terrorism is two pronged: increase effective police work and battle the reservoir of potential support. Terrorists see themselves as a vanguard of a righteous cause, by inciting their causes, we can only work to increases their furry, not decrease it. Anger over U.S. occupation is the most effective sales pitch to the al Qaeda recruiters. That’s a fact.

Domestic and military institutions too are rotting at feet of an Iraq presence. If North Korea were to invade South Korea right now (a much greater threat to our national security) we wouldn’t have the military strength to defend the South Koreans, and nuclear war would be an inevitable outcome; our army is the smallest it’s been since before WWII. If a natural disaster were to strike, we wouldn’t have the domestic strength to allay the suffering; the war is going to cost more than 600 billion dollars by the end of Bush’s second term. The dominoes aren’t falling in the Middle East, they’re falling in America. That’s a fact.

Finally, invading armies don’t have rights, they have responsibilities; indeed, the most rational argument for a continued presence in Iraq is that the U.S. Army now has a duty to promoting the wellbeing of the Iraqi people—such liability is inevitably incurred when an army illegally invades a near helpless country, decimates its cities, and kills more than 30,000 of its innocent civilians. However, a better future isn’t the end of the argument, it’s the beginning. Iraqis want electricity, they want food and running water, and they want material necessities. We should give them aid and supply them with these necessities. We should organize a national coalition, express confidence in the United Nations and our European allies, and work to stabilize the region. The U.S. should continue economic assistance, but end all military operations and withdrawal immediately. We owe the Iraqis a better future; we can’t give it to them at gunpoint.

As you reflect today on the disaster of Iraq—the death of your fellow countrymen and innocent Iraqi civilians, the billions of dollars you will someday be made to pay, and the terrorists emboldened by a desire for vengeance—consider this: nothing is worse than knowing that your mother, your father, your brother, your aunt or your uncle died in vain. The Iraqi people—though at times it’s hard to imagine—also want democracy and freedom. Let's heed their call for autonomy, for representation, and for peace; let's give a noble purpose to an ignoble war. The United States can't ship Iraqis democracy on the barrels of M-16s and AK-47s, we can give the Iraqis freedom by allowing them to be free—free from American rule.

Doctor Dean for the DNC

It is necessary to concede that the Democratic Party is in a state of disarray. John Kerry, a war veteran who won every presidential debate, lost to one of the most vulnerable incumbents in history. Why? He lost because he was unable articulate his beliefs outside the parameters defined by his opponents. As a minority within The House, The Senate, and The Supreme Court, Democrats will look to their top demagogue, the Chairman of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to preachify their message on a national scale. Above all, they need a progressive who can command major media attention and revamp the liberal message by clearly defining what it means to be a Democrat in the 21^st century. The selection of Howard Dean as a Chairman of the DNC promises to inspire new energy into the 213-year-old Democratic Party.

The most promising facet of Howard Dean’s Chairmanship is that the National Democratic Party may learn to reflect his genuine political enthusiasm and bold stances in policy. He was correct about the war in Iraq, even though he was ridiculed by over-patriotic media outlets of post-septemeber 11^th America. He was correct that the Democratic part must extend beyond liberal elitists in the Northeast to “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks”, even though he was brutally criticized for the sentiment. Finally, most importantly perhaps, Howard Dean was correct that voters care more about convictional assertiveness than political cogency. Dean, like George Bush, understands that you can only win a presidential election if voters know exactly what you stand for. In fact, before cleverly stolen by Mr. Bush, it was Dean who said: you may not believe in what I say, but at least you know where I stand.

Howard Dean, prior to the 2004 primaries, established an unprecedented fundraising infrastructure based around internet weblogs, meetups, and streaming video which allowed the electorate to more directly contribute to the campaign. To win in the years to come, Democrats need to continue to bolster the power of this pluralist system while continuing to become less and less allegiant to ­big money donors. Dean is a true-bread populist that believes in the power of the individual. Not the type of populism espoused by the Bush administration: speaking unintelligently while cutting taxes for the very richest, but the real deal. Dean allows supporters to influence the campaign at an unprecedented rate, an idea that Republicans quietly fear.

The political and media elites within Washington a­­­re quick to characterized Dr. Dean as an uncontrollable liberal. Washington insiders make dubious assumptions about the average voter, claiming that Dean is an anathema for democrats hoping to win over “red” states like Kansas; a state where Kerry won only one county in the 2004 presidential bid. This claim contradicts the fact that the some of the first Deaniac endorsements came from party leaders in Alabama, Mississippi, and, yes, Kansas. The Florida Democratic Chairman’s statements gave proof to how out of touch Washington pundits are: "I'm a gun-owning pickup-truck driver and I have a bulldog named Lockjaw," said Scott Maddox. "I am a Southern chairman of a Southern state, and I am perfectly comfortable with Howard Dean as DNC chair."

After “the scream heard around the world” early during the primaries last year, Howard Dean’s flaws as a presidential candidate became obvious. But, as former DNC chair David Wilhelm assures worried congressional democrats, “What seemed wild in a presidential candidate will seem much more normal in a chair of a national party.” Dean’s over-zealousness and over-ambition will likely translate from flaws as a presidential candidate to virtues for the Democratic Party. As Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson sums up, he will “bring new spirit and new energy to the party, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time”.

The unanimous election of Howard Dean as DNC chair indicates two things. First, there are democrats out there who are not afraid to vote for strong, charismatic candidate that is willing to push for change. Secondly, it indicated an auspicious new reconstruction of democratic ideology. “We need to be proud to Democrats” Dean tells supports. Pride it seems, is exactly what Dean can deliver.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

The 1949 Geneva Convention was established in order to institute a legally binding modicum of humanness into modern warfare. This ‘humanness’ was established through Prisoner of War provisions, making constitutionally inadmissible interrogation practices (like torture) illegal to those deemed Prisoners of War. This treaty is hailed by many as one of the most important and proactive steps towards universal humanity ever taken. However, the very practices warned against by the Geneva Convention, like physical or psychological torture (seemingly both “cruel” and “unusual”), the Bush administration has shamelessly sponsored within the detainee camp, Guantánamo Bay and others very similar.

According to a not-so-confidential International Red Cross report, the American interrogators within the Guantánamo Bay camp (and others) used coercive tactics against detainees such as “humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, and use of forced positions…and some beatings.” These reports, clearly, indicate that the atrocities committed within the Abu Ghraib prisons were not part of an isolated incident, rather, what seems like, a government sponsored propensity towards disrespect, ethnocentrism, and torture. Despite the polite language of the Red Cross Report, it’s not “tantamount to torture.” It’s torture. It’s not “detainee abuse.” It’s torture. An American administration, who issues a report grading other countries on their sponsorship or violations of human rights, seems to endorse similar violations of human rights when the legal system leaves our homeland.

Don’t get me wrong, I love our country, and I believe any terrorist who threatens it should be sought out and killed. However, patriotism will never becloud my moral compass and should never serve as a mandate to perpetuate evil and hatred. I have no sympathy for terrorists, but I believe in due process of the law and I also believe in decency. If you don’t, so be it. However the assertion that these roughly 600 detainees are ''the worst of a very bad lot,'' as Vice President Dick Cheney has called them, is just blatant untruthfulness. In fact, evidence against these detainees, evidence of the crimes they committed, is so sparse that investigators have barely been able to make a case for more than 20 prisoners! Not only are the names of the detainees not being released, but they are imprisoned for indefinite amounts of time, not even charged with a crime—essentially, they awarded no due process of the law. Scratch that, no law at all.

Some optimists, certainly naive ones, claim that detainees are afforded very hospitable living conditions within Guantánamo. This, for some, may be so. However this is hardly the case for all (or even most). For example, 100 supposedly “high value” detainees have been held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, for more than 5 months. Those who perceive solitary confinement and other psychological coercive tactics as hospitable are grossly misinformed.

However, unfortunately, torture can extend much farther than psychological limitations. For example, Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, the former chief of Iraqi air defenses, was brutally killed on November 26 at a detention facility at Al Qaim, northwest of Baghdad. According to autopsy evidence, he died from "asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression." This smothering and compression, according to the Denver Post documents and Pentagon investigators, is due to soldiers tying him in a sleeping bag, sitting on his face, beating him, and hitting him against a wall until he died. Eight more homicides, according to the Pentagon a briefing, have occurred "either before or during interrogation sessions that may have led to the detainee's death.” It is disgusting and horrifying to fathom torture and death at the hands of United States investigators. However, sadly we must acknowledge this as truth.

Do terrorists deserve torture? That’s a moral conviction. Do un-convicted nameless detainees—out of 600 only about 12 of whom are even affiliated with Al Qaeda—deserve inhuman treatment unregulated by international law, potentially leading to death? No (and that’s a logical conviction not a moral one). Harsh treatment of terrorists might be necessary to extract valuable information, I’ll concede that point. However, after three long years with detainees who, according to research done by The New York Times, are significantly overestimated in value, torture has no strategic implications, only evil intents.

This behavior, seemingly, would violate the Geneva Convention protocol. You’d think, wouldn’t you? Not according to the now-Secretary of Defense Alberto Gonzales, who, in a memo to George W. Bush in 2002, claims that The War on Terror “renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning…and quaint some of its provisions”. Essentially, the Bush administration has unilaterally decided that humane treatment of detainees is a “quaint” provision by which the United States does not have to abide. Subsequently, former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld invented the term “illegal combatants” to bypass this international Geneva protocol (and not to mention the United States precedent). Under the Geneva Convention, a prisoner is only protected if he is considered a Prisoner of War (POW). Though this POW status needs to be determined by a “qualified tribunal” (not merely Bush, Gonzales, and their cronies), if it is not awarded, the detainee is not protected under the Geneva Convention and not guaranteed basic human rights such as adequate food supply and medical treatment.

Ironically, in anticipation of the reversal of this “enemy combatant” status by a higher (legally and ideologically) court, these detainees will most likely have to be released back to Iraq. What will they do there? Fight, of course. Inevitably, if they weren’t enemies before, now enraged by their unregulated and dishonorable detainment, these ‘combatants’ will become card-carrying United States terror seekers to a radical degree. If anything, poor treatment of Iraqis prisoners, will guarantee even more poor treatment of United States’ soldiers.

It is horrifying and even shameful to acknowledge that the United State’s interrogators, in the 21^st century, have stooped to such archaic and barbaric levels of warfare by torturing and brutally killing detainees. Why? The strategic importance of torture, frankly, is not evident; rather, it seems torture is merely used to channel inbred ethnocentrism and fundamental disrespect for Muslim culture. Even more disgusting is the apathy of higher governmental powers towards the atrocities committed and the utter denial of their existence. As Americans, we should demand the extension of the Geneva Convention to detainees, we should make sure that Abu Ghraib does not occur again and again, and we should fight for the same decency and lawfulness abroad that we enjoy at home. The United States should stand for the universal respect of mankind.

A Case for Marijuana Legalization

For 50 years, the strict legislative ban on Marijuana has done nothing to stop, or even deter slightly, its rampant use within the United States. Instead, the prohibition has worked to create an underground drug network making criminals out of the roughly 15 million users nationwide, many of whom use the drug recreationally within the confines of their own homes. The criminal action taken against these 15 million pot-using heathens clearly does much more to hurt their future than taking puffs of the drug itself. Citizens who decide to employ mind altering drugs have little legal recourse except to indulge in a far more dangerous, however completely legal, option: tobacco and alcohol. Something needs to be done about marijuana, but what? The answer to the cannabis conundrum is clear: legalize it, regulate it, and tax the marijuana, a substance that DEA Administrative Law Judge Francis Young called "the safest therapeutically active substance known to man".

Regardless of future policy, it does not take much to see that government’s current marijuana policy is in complete disarray. Continuing current policy would mean expending almost 10 billion dollars a year in a fruitless war against marijuana; catching a small fraction of users and making examples of them. Not only are punitive laws ineffectual, but the ban is causing more social problems than the marijuana itself. Though it’s hard to determine the full extent of our government’s marijuana regulation failure, the fact that one third of the United State’s population twelve years or older (85,000,000 people), have admitted to using marijuana at some time in their lives indicates that the policy has failed at its primary goal of stopping usage. Another option—the stance many marijuana prohibitionists take— which is really just an expansion of the current system, would be a large-scale attempt to catch, prosecute, and put a significant percentage of the current marijuana users behind bars. However, not only would this be economically infeasible, but the ethics of a society which attempts to put 5 percent of their population behinds bars because of a relatively harmless plant should be called into question.

Decriminalization, which is a significant decrease in the punishment for marijuana possession, is the in vogue compromise to the escalating controversy about the future of marijuana in America. This solution, which 10 states have adopted, promises to decrease the use of resources spent in the name of marijuana, (resources such as police officers, court rooms, and jails) by ending active pursuit of marijuana users themselves. However, decriminalization offers no solution towards dissolving the thriving drug market (dealing marijuana is still illegal), and despite its name, leaves the user still connected with the criminal market, still jeopardizing the wellbeing of the recreational user. This leaves me to believe that the full legalization of marijuana is the only truly permanent and pragmatic solution the very real issue concerning marijuana’s place in America’s future.

It’s necessary to concede that marijuana is detrimental to one’s health and that legalization may increase use in some respects, however the two should not be taken as self evident truths. In fact, according to a very surprising 2003 reanalysis of 15 previous studies, experts found that “long-term and even daily marijuana use doesn't appear to cause permanent brain damage” adding to evidence that marijuana is not only safe over time, but can be used as an effective treatment for disease. It’s certainly note-worthy that with marijuana illegal, its contents cannot be regulated—making it a potentially more dangerous substance than if it were legalized and regulated under the FDA. Also, increases in statistical marijuana use directly after legalization should not be taken seriously because naturally, once legal, more people will admit to regular use of marijuana, thus skewing the data.

Many pot-prohibitionists will point with fear at the aftermath of the alcohol prohibition repeal. They will remind us of the juggernaut tobacco and alcohol industry aimed at young people. They will claim: Marijuana is bad! We don’t need yet-another drug targeted at our children! They might try to paint you a picture of a complete, drug induced, social breakdown. Where everywhere marijuana is pushed into the social forefront being used, abused, and forced into our lives just like alcohol after prohibition. Don’t succumb to believing this despicable slander! America has matured as a nation. We don’t need to take a laissez-faire attitude like we did with both tobacco and alcohol, allowing a marijuana industry to burgeon rapidly right beneath our noses. No, by devising a feasible post-legalization plan we can regulate the industry by creating age limits, marketing and merchandising restrictions, banning advertising, and regulating marijuana use through high taxation.

The fact of the matter is: our society would reap tremendous economic benefits by taking advantage of a lucrative underground marijuana industry already in place. Rather than loosing 10 billion dollars a year in preventative efforts, we can gain money through taxation. Not only would we gain substantial amounts of money from taxes and save a not insubstantial amount by not pursuing pot-using criminals, but by noting the tremendous number of marijuana related cases a year, it is clear that a lot of police time and jail space can be redirected to more serious offenses.

When confronted with this fact, often prohibition supporters put morality into question: How can a society profit off drugs without condoning its use? Though a valid the concern, the argument is severely flawed. Everyday, people across the country use one type of drug or another. The obligation of the society is not to restrict a person’s right to choice, rather it is to make sure that safe drugs, though discouraged, are available and that unsafe drugs are taxed heavily and not available. The United States already taxes the two most pernicious, yet readily available drugs on the market (tobacco and alcohol) without any qualms concerning ethics, why should a significantly less harmful drug be kept out of the market?

Also, though opponents of legalization might claim otherwise, I believe it its not marijuana itself that is a “gateway” towards more serious drugs, rather it’s the criminal scene in which it’s obtained. The Netherlands, which has used this concept of separating marijuana from the criminal scene by allowing its sale at “coffee shops”, has seen great success and significantly curtailed their industry. Granted, the United States is not the Netherlands and we can’t assume their success would reflect our own, but not only has marijuana use not increased after its legalization (remaining at 3% of the population as apposed to the United State’s 5%) but hard drug usage has actually gone down! This, if anything, proves that a legalization of marijuana would not, by any standards, be disastrous to the sanctity of American society, instead it might help to decrease hard drug use by removing the criminal link between the hard drugs and the recreational marijuana user.

It is clear that the legalization of marijuana, a measure taken with care and sophistication within a system utilizing strict government regulation, can offer many positive benefits economically, medically, and towards the preservation of liberty and personal choice. A federally initiated system that regulates the cost, the content, and the consumers of commercial marijuana would allow a redirection of funds and resources away from a fruitless battle against marijuana and towards more serious law infractions. Whether in fashion or not, when considering the abysmal state of government regulation of marijuana consumption, legalization must be considered as a practical solution to very real issue. Let the historical precedence be considered: prohibition did not work then and clearly it is not working now, I say legalize it!